I’m really excited about this one, because it’s done entirely in the form of comics, and says some things that I don’t think would be possible using writing alone. The article is actually about writing, and about the multimodal properties of writing that we usually take for granted. I argue that writing isn’t just an empty container for linguistic “content,” but that it has unique visual and spatial properties that also convey meaning in distinct ways. You can The article uses the form of comics to denaturalise text-based writing and to interrogate its properties. I also use the the nonlinguistic speech of Woodstock, the little bird from Charles Shulz’s Peanuts comic strip and the genre of asemic writing as a kind of lens to examine what writing can say even when it doesn’t “say” anything.

I had a bit of help in putting the article together from the cartoonist John Carvajal who did the final inks based off of my pencils. John is a great cartoonist in his own right, and it was a real pleasure to work with him. It was very interesting to see another person interpret my pencil drawings and bring their own touch to the project. Below is an example of the penciled draft I gave to John, and the final version he put together. The text and layout are mostly the same, but some little details are different — his lettering is very different from mine, he’s used a thicker, more consistent line, embellished the backgrounds, and given his own spin to the character. I’m very curious about how this changes the ways that readers react to and interpret the meaning of the comic.

One of my favorite things that John did was add himself into one of the scenes! My sketched draft just had a generic guy looking at his phone, but John drew the character as what I think is a representation of himself. It’s a great drawing, and much more interesting and expressive than what I originally had, as well as a fun little in-joke.

What exactly are all those books, posters, phones and newspapers saying? That’s the crux point of the article, so have a read and let me know what you think! If you have enjoyed this, I have another comics-style journal article which is in the pipeline. More “graphic scholarship” coming your way soon!

Evan Wexler receives the main by-line for this story, but there is no accompanying text – the entire story is contained in Taylor’s illustrations – so it’s hard to know who contributed what to this piece.

Wexler calls himself a “Visual Journalist”, and most of his other work for Frontline has an infographic aesthetic, involving images which look a lot like sans-serif fonts and attempt to convey the same myth of neutrality that’s attached to typeset text.

This piece with Taylor is interesting in that it has a more tactile and subjective feel to it. The smudged ballpoint pen ink and yellowed photographs pasted onto graph paper come close to mimicking a student assignment from the years before Microsoft Office.

There’s an emotional component to the way this data is presented, a nostalgia for the “simpler days,” when sharing a newspaper photo meant actually cutting it out of the newspaper. It’s a good illusion; I found myself staring at my computer screen looking for traces of eraser dust on the images of the paper.

And yet – a closer look at these images reveals a digitally manicured sheen. The smooth gradient colours behind the drawings, the copy-and-pasted heads in the “7/10 teens” graphic, all reveal that these images have been constructed with Photoshop, not gluestick.

It wouldn’t have been difficult to digitally massage these images to look more authentically handmade, but I don’t think that’s the point. The digital effects, subtle as they are, mark this piece as having been processed, at some stage or another, but a computer, of being buffed down and shined up by a professional designer using an expensive suite of software.

There’s just enough obvious fakery here to let the reader know that, no, of course Frontline didn’t just publish scans of some graphs drawn straight onto graph paper with a BIC pen. That’s just not how journalism works.